by Karen Swan
‘Obviously she has no idea about the . . .’ Holly continued, gesturing in Tara’s direction and clearly meaning the engagement, the baby, everything.
‘I said stop!’ Tara slammed her foot on the brake so suddenly they both slumped forward from the force. They were ten metres from the driveway. ‘Stop talking! I don’t want to hear it.’
Holly stared at her. ‘. . . You don’t think it’s important to know if your boyfriend’s cheating on you?’ Her voice was quiet, trying to be calming, even as she knew that every word she uttered was a bomb to Tara’s happiness.
‘I know he’s not.’ Tara could feel the chill from her own glare.
There was a pause as Holly faltered, before she staggered on. ‘. . . Annie said James was adamant about it, that he saw something on his computer . . . Why would she lie?’
‘I’m sure she wouldn’t, not intentionally, but she’s been with the guy for all of a week! Does she have any clue that James hates Alex? That he’s riddled with jealousy over the fact that their professor favours Alex and not him, that he’d say anything to try and tear him down? He probably thinks breaking us up would distract Alex just enough to give him some kind of edge! I think there are a few people who would like to see us break up.’
There was no disguising the pointedness of her words and Holly looked at her for a long moment with sad, questioning eyes that only made Tara angrier. ‘So then, you don’t think there’s any truth in it at all? You’ve never had any suspicions—’
‘None! I trust Alex completely.’
‘And you believed him when he said he was bonding with your father this weekend?’
Tara stared at her, open-mouthed and furious as she finally realized why Holly had come back repeatedly to the topic of conversation. ‘It would be a pretty fucking stupid cover story, let’s face it! One phone call to my parents and I’d have the truth.’
‘I guess that’s true,’ Holly conceded.
‘Of course it’s true,’ Tara snapped.
‘Twig, I just don’t want to see you get hurt, that’s all. Alex is a good-looking guy and he knows it. He knows he could have anyone.’
‘Really? Anyone?’ Tara sneered.
Holly’s eyes widened. ‘Oh God, not me! Fuck no! I just mean he’s no innocent. He’s charming, but he’s not . . . fluffy. He’s got a ruthless streak. I’ve seen it in him sometimes when he talks. He’s so uncompromising.’
‘And you? Are you compromising? Have you been supportive and flexible over the changes I’ve got coming? Or have you been cutting me out because my plans no longer align with yours?’ Tara glowered at her with an anger Holly had never seen before. She was always so good at keeping her emotions under control, hiding parts of herself from the public gaze with a dance between shadows and light. She was a pleaser, forever the good girl, the mother hen, a product of her upbringing in which she tried to temper her outrageous good fortune with self-effacement and steadfast placidity. ‘What other people think they know is of no interest to me. Annie knows as much about Alex as I know about James, so you know what, Hols? Next time Annie brings it up, tell her from me, to tell James to go fuck himself!’
Holly’s mouth dropped open at her language. Tara had never spoken to her like that before.
Tara looked away, but she could feel herself shake, the adrenaline tearing through her body. She moved the car clumsily back into gear and rolled them forwards the last few metres. Taking the bag of groceries from Holly’s lap, she got out of the car. ‘And don’t even think of insulting me with that bloody test either!’ Holly’s gaze followed Tara’s to the bag between her ankles. She looked shocked and then shame-faced.
‘Twig, I’m sorry—’
But Tara didn’t hear it over the slam of the car door. She had already turned her back.
Chapter Eight
London sparkled like a cut diamond, glass towers reflecting the sun as she turned off the motorway and headed in on the arterial roads, slowing to a crawl alongside black cabs and delivery vans, trundling past smoked Victorian terraces, dark with soot and exhaust fumes. She didn’t notice as the narrow red-bricked houses were replaced by wider, taller Georgian stucco villas, as the red buses became more numerous and she never moved beyond second gear. Her mind was on the tense end to Sophie’s birthday weekend.
Nothing had been said outright, but it was clear from the watchful looks thrown her way as she had angrily set down the bag of groceries, and the weighty silence that had accompanied Holly’s arrival several moments later, that this ‘talk’ had been planned. Hols had just been the messenger. They had evidently all discussed it between themselves and come to their conclusions: Alex was deceiving her and she was a pitiful fool if she refused to see it.
Unable to meet their eyes but refusing to let them see her cry, she had left within the quarter hour, citing a family emergency that no one believed and she didn’t even try to make sound convincing. Sophie had made a feeble attempt to try to make her stay but Tara wouldn’t be placated, knowing what they really thought. She had thrown her bag in the boot of the car, not even zipped up, and left Holly to sort out her own transport back. Tara wouldn’t even look at her. Any of them.
She hadn’t cried all the way home, as she had wanted to, but her body had been held as tense and tight as a metal drum, her ribcage scarcely moving as she breathed in shallow sips, like a swallow skimming a pond for water. Her shoulders were up by her ears and she’d not heard a word or song on the radio, for if her body was still, her mind was racing.
It was all lies. Alex wasn’t cheating on her, she knew that for certain. She knew what they had. The chemistry between them was more real, more visceral than the skin on her hands. Passion like theirs couldn’t simply be made up or faked. When they were together, she felt his appetite for her; quite literally it was appetite – he would bite her, graze his teeth on her skin, nestle his face in her hair, squeeze and pinch her; she would dig her nails in his skin. Mere touch wasn’t enough. Sometimes she felt they wanted to swallow each other whole.
So why, then . . . why couldn’t she shake off the feeling of unease? Even as she had shut down Holly’s words, the tiny doubts that had been picking threads at the furthest reaches of her mind all week had begun to pull. The impulsiveness of his proposal, which had seemingly surprised him as much as her: was that guilt? The dragging of his feet afterwards: was that regret? His odd insistence upon etiquette as a form of respect to her parents: was that just something useful to hide behind as he procrastinated and looked for a way out? Did he have doubts?
Did he have someone else?
It seemed so impossible, to her. But what if Annie was right and men were different? She’d never been in love before. He was her first love, but she wasn’t his: she knew there’d been other women, lots of them. His teenage years had been so much freer than hers; for one thing, he hadn’t had a security detail tailing him every time he went out till he was eighteen.
She parked outside his flat, the little cream car seemingly having driven there itself as she continued staring out over the steering wheel, not even seeing the familiar street, or his bike chained to the black railings. She just sat there, blind and lost in her thoughts, the minutes dragging past as suspicions presented themselves and contradicted each other by turns.
Was she the one being disloyal to him for even having these thoughts? He’d never done anything to make her doubt his feelings for her, so why would she attach weight to the comments of a man she knew despised him? Was threatened by him?
No. This was madness. With a shake of her head, she pulled the keys from the ignition and clambered out of the car. For the first time, she took stock of her surroundings and looked up at the third-floor windows of his flat. They were in darkness, no lights shining from within. She checked the time – it was just gone four. If he and her father were playing the full eighteen holes, they’d be finishing around now. Allowing for time to get back to Battersea heliport . . . she estimated she had a good hour to herself, to calm
down and settle – and to charge her phone. After the night spent in her coat pocket and then the three-hour journey back through the hills and down the motorway – the charging cable remembered too late in her overnight bag in the back – it had given up the ghost a third of the way down the M6.
Reaching for her things, she walked up to his door and used the spare key he had given her in their first week together. She let herself into the flat and dropped her bag with a sigh of relief as his usual untidy carelessness presented itself – shoes in a kicked-off pile under the hall console, papers spread in a messy heap across the kitchen table, the milk carton left out on the worktop, a shirt and several pairs of boxers drying on the clothes airer. It was hardly the scene of a seduction in her absence.
Feeling her doubts cast off once and for all – feeling guilty that she’d even given the suspicions airplay – she began tidying up as she plugged her phone in and got the bath running; she opened the windows to air the flat, sniffed and put the milk away, folded his clothes and laid flat the airer in the cupboard. She put the kettle on and began tidying his papers left out on the table. Most of it was colourful jargon to her – pie charts and bar graphs depicting . . . she wasn’t even sure what. She shuffled them into a vaguely neat pile and made herself a decaf coffee, sinking into the chair to drink it whilst keeping an ear out for the sound of the bath filling up.
Outside, she heard the murmur of conversation on the street below, voices carrying but their words indistinct from here, the whine of leaky brakes from Ken Church Street. A pigeon was cooing from a nearby tree; planes coming in to land at Heathrow, not so very far away. Everything suddenly had a comfortingly humdrum familiarity to it and she felt her nerves begin to settle. A quiet Sunday afternoon in the city was exactly what she needed after the duplicity of her countryside weekend, the betrayal of her friends . . .
She picked up the topmost report and read idly, her gaze catching on words like reforestation, vegetation structure, cost-negative carbon sequestration. It was the orange peel report, she realized, the one her father had picked up on. He must have dug it out again to remind himself of the facts, determined to impress his future father-in-law.
She thumbed to the next report, below it, to see her family name spread loud and proud across a headline. And the next. And the next . . . She smiled. Her father might have commissioned a summary report on him, but clearly Alex had decided to do some research of his own too. No wonder they got on so well.
There was a print-out of an FT article, complete with a picture of her father. It showed him in a boardroom somewhere, gripping the hand of another grey-haired man, both looking suitably pleased about some deal. Beneath that was a Forbes profile on her father; it was a year or so old and she remembered it well, coming out shortly after the announcement that the Tremain family was signing up to the Giving Pledge – the new initiative by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates, it had immediately become the world’s most exclusive club in which billionaires pledge to donate the majority, if not all, of their fortunes during their lifetimes or upon their deaths. But that wasn’t why she remembered this journalistic piece. Her father never gave interviews, but the reporters had found some sources prepared to talk, and someone had even supplied a photograph of her and Miles as teenagers. It was the fact that the photograph had been printed without copyright permission that meant her father had been able to threaten to sue unless they made a sizeable donation to his foundation and printed a written apology in the next issue.
Parts of the text had been underlined in blue ink – the nuggets Alex wanted to bring out in conversation and use as part of his charm offensive. She remembered him coming in the other night, saying he’d been trying to find ways to impress her father and if there was one thing he – as a PhD student – could do, it was research. She read the notes with a wry eye; it was always strange to read about her family in the third person, observed by strangers who wrote in a tone that suggested they knew them.
She read it through once, then again, leaning in more closely. Something had caught her attention on the first skim-read, a detail that snagged in her mind . . .
The phone rang suddenly, vibrating loudly against the table and jolting her from her concentration.
She went over to it. Four per cent battery? Still not enough to unplug it. ‘Hello?’ she asked, crouching down on her heels; the cable wasn’t long enough for her to stand.
‘Piglet?’ a voice shouted down the line.
‘Dad! Hi.’
There was a lot of background noise, the line indistinct, and she wondered whether he was in the chopper. ‘Where are you?’ he called. ‘Not still in the sticks, I hope?’
‘No, I’ve just got back. I’m at Alex’s flat.’
‘Good! Because we’re on our way back now. Get over to the house and keep your mother calm till we get there.’
Calm? Tara felt her heart catch. She hardly dared ask the question. ‘Dad . . . do you mean Alex has talked to you?’
‘Absolutely he has!’ he laughed. ‘You’ve found a good one there, Piglet! But I don’t want to talk about it here. Get back home double-time. We’ve got some celebrating to do!’
Tara put the phone down, her hands over her mouth as her excitement suddenly ricocheted. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered to herself, giving a squeal. ‘He’s only gone and done it!’
‘Darling!’
Her mother looked surprised as Tara walked in, not least because for once, she had dressed up. She had put on the Ganni dress she’d been waiting months for an opportunity to wear. It was slim-fitting aubergine silk with a waistband that wasn’t going to be an option for long.
Her mother was sitting on the sofa, a gin and tonic on the table beside her and a magazine on her lap. ‘I didn’t know you were coming over.’
Tara walked to the bar cabinet and poured herself a tonic water, adding a slice of cucumber for visual interest. ‘I know. Twice in one weekend, the world’s going mad,’ she quipped.
Her mother cast an up-down gaze over her. ‘Are you going on after here?’
‘No. I don’t think so,’ Tara smiled. ‘Why? Are you going out?’
‘I hardly think so,’ her mother tutted. ‘I’ve barely seen your father all weekend. He’s been playing golf today, with your Alex.’
Tara’s smiled widened. Her Alex. ‘Yes, I heard. They should be back any second apparently. Dad called.’
‘He called you?’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘And asked you to come over here?’
‘Yes.’
Her mother blinked, no fool. She sat a little straighter. ‘Why would he do that?’
Tara felt her stomach fizz with happiness and excitement. She didn’t know how he and Alex wanted to tell the happy news, but she would have to wait till they got here. ‘Why not? Can’t we enjoy an impromptu Sunday night supper all together before you go off?’ Tara looked around the space. ‘Is Miles in?’
Her mother sank back a little into the cushions. ‘No. Gstaad, remember? Left yesterday morning. He’s back Tuesday night.’
‘Oh yes. I forgot.’ It was probably just as well. She would need to talk Miles around first and carefully engineer the next meeting between her brother and boyfriend. She took a sip of the drink, needing to cool down. She had run her bath too hot and, adding on the hurry to get over here before the others, she was now flustered.
‘Weren’t you off on a jolly somewhere too this weekend?’
‘Yes, Shropshire. For Sophie’s twenty-first. I just got back this afternoon.’
‘Now, Sophie . . .?’ Her mother looked blank.
‘Vet, slight buck teeth.’ Tara knew to reduce her friends down to their compound parts for her mother’s ease of attention. It wasn’t her usual style to be so blunt, but she was still smarting at the way they’d treated her; they’d clearly said far worse about her behind her back and though Sophie hadn’t said anything derogatory outright, she hadn’t stepped in either.
‘Oh yes, Sophie! Love
ly girl. Is she really twenty-one already?’
‘I know.’
‘She looks so much younger. I think because she hasn’t mastered her maquillage yet.’
‘Sophie doesn’t have any make-up.’
‘Well, that’s her problem, right there,’ her mother said with a pitying look. ‘Of course, we shall have to start thinking about your twenty-first.’
‘I don’t want a party.’
‘So you always say, but we really must mark it in some way. It’s far too big a life milestone to just let slip by.’
‘Well, I’ll think about it,’ Tara lied; she had bigger life milestones coming up than a birthday party. She took another sip of tonic as they heard the front door slam and the low timbre of male voices echoed down the hall. Talk about timing!
Tara felt the butterflies in her stomach take wing. Finally, the moment she had been waiting for all week – if not quite all her life – was here. Alex had rung her seven times too since she’d put the phone down to her father, but she’d been in the bath for three of them and missed the rest driving over. She didn’t want to hear half-stories, anyway; she wanted him to tell her everything when he got here. She wanted to know every last detail of his bonding weekend and to forget every single moment of hers, to see the look in his eyes . . .
The door opened, her father filling the void and looking uncharacteristically ebullient in an emerald-green diamond-knit cashmere sweater; for some reason, dressing for golf meant casting off all sartorial sobriety and going all out on colour. ‘There you are!’ he boomed. ‘I was hoping we’d find you together.’
‘Were you, Brucey? And why was that?’ her mother asked with outright suspicion as he strode into the room and kissed her on her powdered cheek. ‘Hello again, Alex.’
‘Samantha, it’s lovely to see you.’ Alex had followed in after him, wearing navy chinos and a button-down shirt and jumper, not his style at all and clearly freshly bought at the club. Tara’s smile widened at the sight of him – too handsome for his own good; awkward and preppy-looking in his new clothes – before he was blocked from sight again by her father coming over for his hug.